Monday, November 8

So about writing: What is the point of this exercise? I don't mean just
this writing, but I'm also not asking about the basic utility of
literacy itself. John Zerzan I ain't. For simplicity's sake, I'll limit the
inquiry to writing that isn't purely conversational or basically utilitarian
— writing undertaken, if not to address a general audience, then at least
with a view to an audience of sorts. And my question is, well, why
bother?

There's a real tendency (or maybe I should say temptation) to view this as a
post-literary age, if not a post-literate one. It's been the era of television
now for about as long as my parents have been alive. The developed world lives
in the shadow of funny cat pictures and YouTube. Homeless guys watch porn on
the public computers at the library while book collections slowly wither in the
face of shrinking budgets and confused administrations. Newspapers and
magazines are dying. The businesses of publishing, journalism, and full-time
authorship are all from a certain angle looking about as shaky as the livery
stable business must have been a century ago.

None of this is irrelevant, exactly, but I think it helps a lot of people to
the wrong conclusions. The technology and the culture of writing are in the
middle of a comprehensive upheaval, sure. But without doing the slightest
amount of research, I'm going to hazard a guess that more text has probably
been written since the introduction of the personal computer than during the
entire duration of recorded history before then.1

To borrow a phrase, the volume of writing today is enormous. There's no
easy place to divide that continuum between the "merely" conversational and
the public/published/professional — every Facebook message between
former or future lovers is a kind of performance, after all, and I've come to
suspect that most writing with a mass audience has more personal targets than
collective ones — but it has to be admitted that there's a vast,
staggering, literally incomprehensible amount of writing intended to be read
by thee and me. Or at least by people like us, for reasons that might be
ours.

Part of this is simple: The Internet took over the world, and now the entire
world is the September That Never Ended, in all its horror and occasional
glory. But this is itself a symptom of something more fundamental. There are
more of h. sapiens right now than there have ever been. We're part of a
civilization that supports hundreds of millions with time to kill and lives
full of electronics. There's a pretty good Mamet line about people who can tell
stories being given dispensation from hauling wood and carrying water. The
present reality is more that a bunch of people were given that dispensation a
while ago so that they could work sitting down in buildings and watch a lot of
television, and then some technology came along that would let them spray prose
all over the place if they felt like bothering. Inevitably some of them did.

And while I maintain that Sturgeon was an optimist, this is not exactly a
dismal state of affairs. A certain fraction of this stuff — and whether
it's one percent or one part-per-billion, it is still more than you will ever
even have time to skim — is really good. There are novelists and
poets and essayists and reporters working today who are probably just about as
good as anyone who has ever lived.

So the crux of it is this: What exactly can you possibly hope to accomplish
by adding to the global slushpile?

I don't mean what can you hope to accomplish by writing a letter about the
weather to your grandma, or a manual for the engine you just designed, or a
hundred pages of heartfelt joy/desolation/boredom/whatever in the
journal you keep by your bed. The utility of all this is apparent to
me.3
It's more that it feels pretty hard to defend the idea that anyone Out There
needs your novel, your collection of poems, your essay on the Rolling Stones,
your detailed breakdown of just what is wrong with the the Democratic Party
these days. There might be a Shakespeare or a Li Po in this generation, but you
aren't him. If what you say is good or true or interesting, someone else still
said it better yesterday and another someone is likely going to say it better
tomorrow. Almost no one will ever read your work, and of the handful who do,
most will only be looking for a place to hang some screed in response. It's one
thing to quietly sketch these things for yourself, or work them out with a
friend, but another altogether to project them, in their near-certain inanity,
into all the noise and numbing profusion of the present
discourse-cum-screaming-match.

On the other hand, Leonard Cohen:

If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of
another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the
image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion
that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the
arrangement of things as they are.

— Beautiful Losers

Trying to publicly write out a sense of futility about writing in public is
a good exercise in remembering why you do it in the first place. Or maybe not
exactly in the first place. (When I started doing this I was a kid in high school
with a bunch of short-shelf-life obsessions, we all thought the Internet was
the Revolution, and I can no longer quite remember why I did anything.)
But let's say why I've kept it up for 12 or 13 years.

You can understand writing a lot of ways. Importantly, as a way to reason
and feel your way to some new state. A way to transmit this or that idea. A way
to preserve the data of experience. But what subsumes and contains all that, I
think, is that writing is an act: a motion, an undertaking, an assault
on the arrangement of things. An assertion of the ego and an unbinding, however
temporary, imperfect, or ultimately illusory, from the given world.

All of that can happen in various degrees of privacy. A lot of it is better
left where it won't be so humiliating in the morning. But I've come to feel
that the real work is more often than not the work that you attempt with and
for (and often enough in opposition to) other people. Good musicians, by and
large, play a lot with other musicians. The best play for a crowd, for and to
an audience. In almost every field there are levels you will never reach unless
you're already struggling to meet demands that are presently beyond you,
approaching problems you're unequipped for. In technical circles, around
people who make things generally, there is always the implicit question:
Well, what have you done?

I'm not sure I have a good answer yet, but I'm starting to have an idea of
what it looks like to work on one.

1 All right, I don't know how you'd even begin to quantify this,
but someone must have ideas. Douglas Engelbart demoed the computer mouse and
collaborative text editing, among other things, in 1968. Let's round up from
there to 1970, the year of the Unix epoch, and use that as our dividing line.
It's earlier than "personal computers" were available to the masses, but if you
wanted to locate the historical moment when computer environments began to
shape the literary world, you could probably do worse.

Ok, so is it terrifically far-fetched to think that the last 40 years have
produced a greater volume of text than the 5000 or so before that? Maybe.
Maybe even probably. I would welcome any pointers to relevant sources.

2 Substitute "horseshit" as-needed.

3 In order: In a given lifetime, there's a fair chance you
should write to your grandmother(s) at least 3 times as often as you do, and
if you can't write about the weather, you've already lost. Civilization hangs
by the thin thread of a small residuum of usable documentation. If you put it
in your journal, there's some hope you'll spare the rest of us hearing about
it.